20

The Little Drab Book

I FOUND Davies at the cabin table, surrounded
with a litter of books. The shelf was empty, and
its contents were tossed about among the cups and
on the floor. We both spoke together.

'Well, what was it?'

'Well, what did she say?'

I gave way, and told my story briefly. He
listened in silence, drumming on the table with a
book which he held.

'It's not good-bye,' he said. 'But I don't
wonder; look here!' and he held out to me a small
volume, whose appearance was quite familiar to me,
if its contents were less so. As I noted in an
early chapter, Davies's library, excluding
tide-tables, 'pilots', etc., was limited to two
classes of books, those on naval warfare, and
those on his own hobby, cruising in small yachts.
He had six or seven of the latter, including
Knight's Falcon in the Baltic,
Cowper's Sailing Tours, Macmullen's
Down Channel, and other less-known
stories of adventurous travel. I had scarcely
done more than look into some of them at
off-moments, for our life had left no leisure for
reading. This particular volume was--no, I had
better not describe it too fully; but I will say
that it was old and unpretentious, bound in cheap
cloth of a rather antiquated style, with a title
which showed it to be a guide for yachtsmen to a
certain British estuary. A white label partly
scratched away bore the legend '3d.' I had glanced
at it once or twice with no special interest.

'Well?' I said, turning over some yellow pages.

'Dollmann!' cried Davies. 'Dollmann wrote it.'
I turned to the title-page, and read: 'By Lieut.
X--, R.N.' The name itself conveyed nothing to me,
but I began to understand. Davies went on: The
name's on the back, too--and I'm certain it's the
last she looked at.'

'But how do you know?'

'And there's the man himself. Ass that I am
not to have seen it before! Look at the
frontispiece.'

It was a sorry piece of illustration of the
old-fashioned sort, lacking definition and finish,
but effective notwithstanding; for it was
evidently the reproduction, though a cheap and
imperfect process, of a photograph. It
represented a small yacht at anchor below some
woods, with the owner standing on deck in his
shirt sleeves: a well-knit, powerful man, young,
of middle height, clean shaved. There appeared to
be nothing remarkable about the face; the portrait
being on too small a scale, and the expression,
such as it was, being of the fixed 'photographic'
character.

'How do you know him? You said he was fifty,
with a greyish beard.'

'By the shape of his head; that hasn't changed.
Look how it widens at the top, and then
flattens--sort of wedge shaped--with a high, steep
forehead; you'd hardly notice it in that' (the
points were not very noticeable, but I saw what
Davies meant). 'The height and figure are right,
too; and the dates are about right. Look at the
bottom.'

Underneath the picture was the name of a yacht
and a date. The publisher's date on the
title-page was the same.

'Let's work the thing out. Sixteen years ago
he was still an Englishman, an officer in Her
Majesty's Navy. Now he's a German. At some time
between this and then, I suppose, he came to
grief--disgrace, flight, exile. When did it
happen?'

'They've been here three years; von
Brüning said so.'

'It was long before that. She has talked
German from a child. What's her age, do you
think--nineteen or twenty?'

'About that.'

'Say she was four when this book was published.
The crash must have come not long after.'

'And they've been hiding in Germany since.

'Is this a well-known book?'

'I never saw another copy; picked this up on a
second-hand bookstall for threepence.'

'She looked at it, you say?'

'Yes, I'm certain of it.'

'Was she never on board you in September?'

'No; I asked them both, but Dollmann made
excuses.'

'But he--he came on board? You told
me so.'

'Once; he asked himself to breakfast on the
first day. By Jove! yes; you mean he saw the
book?

'It explains a good deal.'

'It explains everything.'

We fell into deep reflexion for a minute or
two.

'Do you really mean everything?' I
said. 'In that case let's sail straight away and
forget the whole affair. He's only some poor
devil with a past, whose secret you stumbled on,
and, half mad with fear, he tried to silence you.
But you don't want revenge, so it's no business of
ours. We can ruin him if we like; but is it worth
it?'

'You don't mean a word you're saying,' said
Davies, 'though I know why you say it; and many
thanks, old chap. I didn't mean
"everything". He's plotting with
Germans, or why did Grimm spy on us, and von
Brüning cross-examine us? We've got to find
out what he's at, as well as who he is. And as to
her--what do you think of her now?'

I made my amende heartily. 'Innocent
and ignorant,' was my verdict. 'Ignorant, that
is, of her father's treasonable machinations; but
aware, clearly, that they were English refugees
with a past to hide.' I said other things, but
they do not matter. 'Only,' I concluded, 'it
makes the dilemma infinitely worse.'

'There's no dilemma at all,' said Davies. 'You
said at Bensersiel that we couldn't hurt him
without hurting her. Well, all I can say is,
we've got to. The time to cut and run,
if ever, was when we sighted her dinghy. I had a
baddish minute then.'

'She's given us a clue or two after all.'

'It wasn't our fault. To refuse to have her on
board would have been to give our show away; and
the very fact that she's given us clues decides
the matter. She mustn't suffer for it.'

'What will she do?'

'Stick to her father, I suppose.'

'And what shall we do?'

'I don't know yet; how can I know? It
depends,' said Davies, slowly. 'But the point is,
that we have two objects, equally important--yes,
equally, by Jove!--to scotch him, and save her.'

There was a pause.

'That's rather a large order,' I observed. 'Do
you realize that at this very moment we have
probably gained the first object? If we went home
now, walked into the Admiralty and laid our facts
before them, what would be the result?'

'The Admiralty!' said Davies, with ineffable
scorn.

'Well, Scotland Yard, too, then. Both of them
want our man, I dare say. It would be strange if
between them they couldn't dislodge him, and,
incidentally, either discover what's going on here
or draw such attention to this bit of coast as to
make further secrecy impossible.'

'It's out of the question to let her betray her
father, and then run away! Besides, we don't know
enough, and they mightn't believe us. It's a
cowardly course, however you look at it.'

'Oh! that settles it,' I answered, hastily.
'Now I want to go back over the facts. When did
you first see her?'

'That first morning.'

'She wasn't in the saloon the night before?'

'No; and he didn't mention her.'

'You would have gone away next morning if he
hadn't called?'

'Yes; I told you so.'

'He allowed her to persuade you to make that
voyage with them?'

'I suppose so.'

'But he sent her below when the pilotage was
going on?'

'Of course.'

'She said just now, "Father said you would
be safe." What had you been saying to her?'

'It was when I met her on the sand. (By the
way, it wasn't a chance meeting; she had been
making inquiries and heard about us from a skipper
who had seen the yacht near Wangeroog, and she had
been down this way before.) She asked at once
about that day, and began apologizing, rather
awkwardly, you know, for their rudeness in not
having waited for me at Cuxhaven. Her father
found he must get on to Hamburg at once.'

'But you didn't go to Cuxhaven; you told her
that? What exactly did you tell her?
This is important.'

'I was in a fearful fix, not knowing what
he had told her. So I said something
vague, and then she asked the very question von
Brüning did, "Wasn't there a
schrecklich sea round the
Scharhorn?"'

'She didn't know you took the short cut, then?'

'No; he hadn't dared to tell her.'

'She knew that they took it?'

'Yes. He couldn't possibly have hidden that.
She would have known by the look of the sea from
the portholes, the shorter time, etc.'

'But when the Medusa hove to and
he shouted to you to follow him--didn't she
understand what was happening?'

'No, evidently not. Mind you, she couldn't
possibly have heard what we said, in that weather,
from below. I couldn't cross-question her, but it
was clear enough what she thought; namely, that he
had hove to for exactly the opposite reason, to
say he was taking the short cut, and that
I wasn't to attempt to follow him.'

'That's why she laid stress on waiting
for you at Cuxhaven?'

' Of course; mine would have been the longer
passage.'

'She had no notion of foul play?'

'None--that I could see. After all, there I
was, alive and well.'

'But she was remorseful for having induced you
to sail at all that day, and for not having waited
to see you arrived safely.'

'That's about it.'

'Now what did you say about Cuxhaven?'

'Nothing. I let her understand that I went
there, and, not finding them, went on to the
Baltic by the Eider river, having changed my mind
about the ship canal.'

'Now, what about her voyage back from Hamburg?
Was she alone?'

'No; the stepmother joined her.'

'Did she say she had inquired about you at
Brunsbüttel?'

'No; I suppose she didn't like to. And there
was no need, because my taking the Eider explained
it.'

I reflected. 'You're sure she hadn't a notion
that you took the short cut?'

'Quite sure; but she may guess it now. She
guessed foul play by seeing that book.'

'Of course she did; but I was thinking of
something else. There are two stories afloat
now--yours to von Brüning, the true one, that
you followed the Medusa to the short
cut; and Dollmann's to her, that you went round
the Scharhorn. That's evidently his version of
the affair--the version he would have given if you
had been drowned and inquiries were ever made; the
version he would have sworn his crew to if they
discovered the truth.'

'But he must drop that yarn when he knows I'm
alive and back again.'

'Yes; but meanwhile, supposing von Brüning
sees him before he knows you're back
again, and wants to find out the truth about that
incident. If I were von Brüning I should
say, "By the way, what's become of that young
Englishman you decoyed away to the Baltic?"
Dollmann would give his version, and von
Brüning. having heard ours, would know he
was lying, and had tried to drown you.'

'Does it matter? He must know already that
Dollmann's a scoundrel.'

'So we've been supposing; but we may be wrong.
We're still in the dark as to Dollmann's position
towards these Germans. They may not even know
he's English, or they may know that and not know
his real name and past. What effect your story
will have on their relations with him we can't
forecast. But I'm clear about one thing, that
it's our paramount interest to maintain the
status quo as long as we can, to minimize
the danger you ran that day, and act as witnesses
in his defence. We can't do that if his story and
yours don't tally. The discrepancy will not only
damn him (that may be immaterial), but it will
throw doubt on us.'

'Why?'

'Because if the short cut was so dangerous that
he dared not own to having led you to it, it was
dangerous enough to make you suspect foul play;
the very supposition we want to avoid. We want to
be thought mere travellers, with no scores to wipe
out, and no secrets to pry after.'

'Well, what do you propose?'

'Hitherto I believe we stand fairly well.
Let's assume we hoodwinked von Brüning at
Bensersiel, and base our policy on that
assumption. It follows that we must show Dollmann
at the earliest possible moment that you
have come back, and give him time to
revise his tactics before he commits himself.
Now--'

'But she'll tell him we're back,'
interrupted Davies.

'I don't think so. We've just agreed to keep
this afternoon's episode a secret. She expects
never to see us again.'

Now, he comes to-morrow by the morning boat,
she said. What did that mean? Boat from where?'

'I know. From Norddeich on the mainland
opposite. There's a railway there from Norden,
and a steam ferry crosses to the island.'

We had a tussle with the tide at first, but
once over the watershed the channel improved, and
the haze lightened gradually. A lighthouse
appeared among the sand-dunes on the island shore,
and before darkness fell we dimly saw the spires
and roofs of a town, and two long black piers
stretching out southwards. We were scarcely a
mile away when we lost our wind altogether, and
had to anchor. Determined to reach our
destination that night we waited till the ebb
stream made, and then towed the yacht with the
dinghy. In the course of this a fog dropped on us
suddenly, just as it had yesterday. I was towing
at the time, and, of course, stopped short; but
Davies shouted to me from the tiller to go on,
that he could manage with the lead and compass.
And the end of it was that, at about nine o'clock,
we anchored safely in the five-fathom roadstead,
close to the eastern pier, as a short
reconnaissance proved to us. It had been a little
masterpiece of adroit seamanship.

There was utter stillness till our chain
rattled down, when a muffled shout came from the
direction of the pier, and soon we heard a boat
groping out to us. It was a polite but sleepy
portofficer, who asked in a perfunctory way for
our particulars, and when he heard them,
remembered the Dulcibella's previous
visit.

'Where are you bound to?' he asked.

'England--sooner or later,' said Davies.

The man laughed derisively. 'Not this year,'
he said; 'there will be fogs for another week; it
is always so, and then storms. Better leave your
yawl here. Dues will be only sixpence a month for
you.

'I'll think about it,' said Davies.
'Good-night.'

The man vanished like a ghost in the thick
night.

'Is the post-office open?' I called after him.

'No; eight to-morrow,' came back out of the
fog.

We were too excited to sup in comfort, or sleep
in peace, or to do anything but plan and
speculate. Never till this night had we talked
with absolute mutual confidence, for Davies broke
down the last barriers of reserve and let me see
his whole mind. He loved this girl and he loved
his country, two simple passions which for the
time absorbed his whole moral capacity. There was
no room left for casuistry. To weigh one passion
against the other, with the discordant voices of
honour and expediency dinning in his ears, had too
long involved him in fruitless torture. Both were
right; neither could be surrendered. If the facts
showed them irreconcilable, tant pis pour les
faits. A way must be found to satisfy both or
neither.

I should have been a spiritless dog if I had
not risen to his mood. But in truth his cutting
of the knot was at this juncture exactly what
appealed to me. I, too, was tired of vicarious
casuistry, and the fascination of our enterprise,
intensified by the discovery of that afternoon,
had never been so strong in me. Not to be
insincere, I cannot pretend that I viewed the
situation with his single mind. My philosophy
when I left London was of a very worldly sort, and
no one can change his temperament in three weeks.
I plainly said as much to Davies, and indeed took
perverse satisfaction in stating with brutal
emphasis some social truths which bore on this
attachment of his to the daughter of an outlaw.
Truths I call them, but I uttered them more by
rote than by conviction, and he heard them
unmoved. And meanwhile I snatched recklessly at
his own solution. If it imparted into our
adventure a strain of crazy chivalry more suited
to knights-errant of the Middle Ages than to sober
modern youths--well, thank Heaven, I was not too
sober, and still young enough to snatch at that
fancy with an ardour of imagination, if not of
character; perhaps, too, of character, for
Galahads are not so common but that ordinary folk
must needs draw courage from their example and put
something of a blind trust in their tenfold
strength.

To reduce a romantic ideal to a working plan is
a very difficult thing.

'We shall have to argue backwards,' I said.
'What is to be the final stage? Because that must
govern the others.'

There was only one answer--to get Dollmann,
secrets and all, daughter and all, away from
Germany altogether. So only could we satisfy the
double aim we had set before us. What a joy it
is, when beset with doubts, to find a bed-rock
necessity, however unattainable! We fastened on
this one and reasoned back from it. The first
lesson was that, however many and strong were the
enemies we had to contend with, our sole overt fee
must be Dollmann. The issue of the struggle must
be known only to ourselves and him. If we won,
and found out 'what he was at', we must at all
costs conceal our success from his German friends,
and detach him from them before he was
compromised. (You will remark that to blithely
accept this limitation showed a very sanguine
spirit in us.) The next question, how to find out
what he was at, was a deal more thorny. If it had
not been for the discovery of Dollmann's identity,
we should have found it as hard a nut to crack as
ever. But this discovery was illuminating. It
threw into relief two methods of action which
hitherto we had been hazily seeking to combine,
seesawing between one and the other, each of us
influenced at different times by different
motives. One was to rely on independent research;
the other to extort the secret from Dollmann
direct, by craft or threats. The moral of to-day
was to abandon the first and embrace the second.

The prospects of independent research were not
a whit better than before. There were only two
theories in the field, the channel theory and the
Memmert theory. The former languished for lack of
corroboration; the latter also appeared to be
weakened. To Fräulein Dollmann the
wreck-works were evidently what they purported to
be, and nothing more. This fact in itself was
unimportant, for it was clear as crystal that she
was no party to her father's treacherous
intrigues, if he was engaged in such. But if
Memmert was his sphere for them, it was
disconcerting to find her so familiar with that
sphere, lightly talking of a descent in a
diving-bell--hinting, too, that the mystery as to
results was only for local consumption.
Nevertheless, the charm of Memmert as the place we
had traced Grimm to, and as the only tangible clue
we had obtained, was still very great. The really
cogent objection was the insuperable difficulty,
known and watched as we were, of learning its
significance. If there was anything important to
see there we should never be allowed to see it,
while by trying and failing we risked everything.
It was on this point that the last of all
misunderstandings between me and Davies was
dissipated. At Bensersiel he had been influenced
more than he owned by my arguments about Memmert;
but at that time (as I hinted) he was biased by a
radical prejudice. The channel theory had become
a sort of religion with him, promising double
salvation--not only avoidance of the Dollmanns,
but success in the quest by methods in which he
was past master. To have to desert it and resort
to spying on naval defences was an idea he dreaded
and distrusted. It was not the morality of the
course that bothered him. He was far too
clear-headed to blink at the essential fact that
at heart we were spies on a foreign power in time
of peace, or to salve his conscience by specious
distinctions as to our mode of operation. The
foreign power to him was Dollmann, a traitor.
There was his final justification, fearlessly
adopted and held to the last. It was rather that,
knowing his own limitations, his whole nature
shrank from the sort of action entailed by the
Memmert theory. And there was strong common sense
in his antipathy.

So much for independent research.

On the other hand the road was now clear for
the other method. Davies no longer feared to face
the imbroglio at Norderney; and that day fortune
had given us a new and potent weapon against
Dollmann; precisely how potent we could not tell,
for we had only a glimpse of his past, and his
exact relations with the Government were unknown
to us. But we knew who he was. Using this
knowledge with address, could we not wring the
rest from him? Feel our way, of course, be guided
by his own conduct, but in the end strike hard and
stake everything on the stroke? Such at any rate
was our scheme to-night. Later, tossing in my
bunk, I be-thought me of the little drab book, lit
a candle, and fetched it. A preface explained
that it had been written during a spell of two
months' leave from naval duty, and expressed a
hope that it might be of service to Corinthian
sailors. The style was unadorned, but scholarly
and pithy. There was no trace of the writer's
individuality, save a certain subdued relish in
describing banks and shoals, which reminded me of
Davies himself. For the rest, I found the book
dull, and, in fact, it sent me to sleep.